The disclosure relates to systems and methods that provide 4+ color management for printers by leveraging 4-color management tools.
Printing systems includes an input module, sometimes referred to a digital front end (DFE). An objective of a DFE is to achieve a desired appearance at every point on a document. This desired appearance has been described in terms of a 3-dimensional uniform color space using perceptual dimensions L*, a*, and b*. The use of more than three final marking colors indicates redundancy. Using conventional 4-color management tools, the strategy for coping with this redundancy is called gray color removal (OCR). Managing this redundancy is one of the most challenging aspects of the task. However, machines that have more than four colors, such as 6-color printers, have increased complexity in management due to the complexity associated with the additional redundancy.
Many tools and techniques have matured over an extended period to manage color on a 4-color printing system, such as a CMYK print engine. However, machines that employ more than 4 colors have greater levels of redundancy and will require new tools of greater complexity.
Related tool development of this kind has been developed to support 6-color products. In one example, a conventional CMYK solution is followed by an algorithm that attempts to preserve hue while mapping CMYK to CMYKcm (Ref. Gregory Braverman, et al, “Hue Preserving Aspects of CMYK-CMYKcm Color Transformations”, ICIS '06, Intl. Congress of Image Science. May 7-11, 2006, pp. 637-640). In this article, a good 4-color actual solution is mapped into a 6-color solution that degrades the color quality as little as possible, minimizing color error and contouring while blending in the new colors. These complex tools are the result of an extended research effort that is described in the literature, but suffer from large development costs and time delays associated with the development cycle of a completely new color management tool that is expanded beyond four color printing.